


sailing

by time_transfixed



Category: Town of Salem (Video Game)
Genre: Blood, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Murder, Other, Public Execution, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-23 20:17:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21087206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/time_transfixed/pseuds/time_transfixed
Summary: five serial killers across five towns, and all the little ways they turned out exactly the same.





	sailing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mothblue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mothblue/gifts), [Aasimar_but_a_Person](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aasimar_but_a_Person/gifts).

1.  
In quiet nights you race across the city, hands clutched tight to the handles of your little chipped motorbike. Breathe in, out, and you can hear everything, see everything, all around you. It chokes up your lungs a little bit--the nervousness, the anticipation, the absolution that you look for and never find.

You know you’ll find it--somewhere, not here though. Salem is not about answers. Salem is about hiding, about questions. The more questions they have the closer you are to winning. That’s what you’ve always thought anyway, and it hasn’t failed you yet. 

Winning. What a stupidly hilarious word. 

Salem slots together though. You know what to do with the people here. Your target. The law enforcement that could stop you at any time. The smug godfather whose face you’d narrowly avoided punching in the other day. 

The doctor though. You don’t know what to do with the doctor. 

He lives on the corner of town--the part where the street sign smudges and you can’t read the letters all the way when it rains because the ink bleeds into wood a little more each time. You don’t know why exactly, but you think it’s a quaint little detail that suits him all too well. 

You don’t understand why he’s helping you. Maybe he’s just as fucked up as you are. Actually, he most certainly is. He rather has to be, to take all your ruined skin and put it back together each time, to cover for you and hide you. 

He doesn’t look surprised to see you now, at the doorway; nor are you surprised that he’s still awake enough to answer the door on time. You stash your bike where the lookout won’t find it when he comes looking, and when he opens the door all the way to let you in, you watch him carefully. Watch him glance over your unsanitized hands and pale face. You watch for his expression to change, for that warm, welcoming smile that had gotten you to spill everything to him over tea somewhere on the fourth or fifth meeting to shift into disgust, into loathing, into _something_ other than the undeserved care he regards you with. 

It stays though. “Are you okay?” he says. It’s always the first thing he asks you. Not, _which of my patients did you kill today_. Not, _how dare you_, or even, _did anyone see you_. 

“I need to make a body in the morgue conveniently disappear,” you say. “Preferably permanently.” 

He nods, in that slow, thoughtful manner of his. You can see the thoughts shifting in his eyes. He’s always known better than you, about this stuff. About the cleanup. “How soon?” he says. 

“By morning,” you say. You glance out the window. It was past midnight when you left your apartment, but somehow the flare of the streetlamps tricks you momentarily into thinking you’re out of time. 

“Alright,” he says. “Should I make you something? You don’t look that great.” It’s phrased like a question, but you’ve been over this enough to know that it isn’t. Not really, anyway. 

“Please,” you say, and mean to add _stay_, and all the other words you could never bring yourself to say with him. 

2.  
_I love you_ is the first and last thing she says to her every night. The arsonist. The pretty politician’s daughter she’d flirted with over every formal dinner just to see the way she rolled her eyes and grit her teeth. Afterwards the other would press her against the endless hallway doors and kiss her, fingers digging sharply into her shoulders. The aggression had slipped straight past skin and deep into her bones, a satisfying little ache that prickled at the back of her throat. That was nice. Then there was nothing but empty words and empty wine glasses under the thick smoke of night. 

There’s no evidence of kisses in the cold morning wind, their breath fogging against each other but the air between them, but empty cans of kerosene stowed away under kitchen sinks and the knife under the pillow she sleeps with sometimes--that’s evidence enough. And sometimes she leaves other little bits of evidence, scattered across the arsonist’s pale skin, one neat little slash after another. All evidence, to be collected and examined and for the defendants to be pronounced guilty. 

There are some races you can’t win, some questions you can’t answer. Her mother had taught her that best, before she’d gone off to chase dreams in cities where the only lights you could see at night were man-made. The arsonist will make it, she’s sure, but for her--she’ll suffocate in a pool of her own vomit before twenty-eight if law enforcement doesn’t catch her first. 

So if she presses a little harder next time, if the knife in her hand shakes a little when she presses it down and the arsonist gasps too loudly in her ear, if if if--

_You fuck_ the arsonist says afterwards. _How am I supposed to get married now?_ She’s laughing though, so it can’t have been all that bad. 

_Who said anything about marriage?_ the serial killer says, a little too sharply, and in the dim lighting of the room the arsonist’s blood gleams thin-red on silver metal. Regret congeals somewhere in her chest. The arsonist grows quiet after that. 

(And here are the things she does not say now: _goodbye, do you love me too, i’m going to go kill someone, are you happy with me, do i make you happy_\--)

3.  
Hanging is overrated. 

That’s the conclusion he comes to at least. Dying at the end of a rope too short to let its prisoners live is miserable, horrifying even, not even much of a spectacle to watch. 

_Do you have any last words_ the coroner-executioner-murderer says. 

The truth is, he has a lot of last words. Any other day he could’ve spent hours poring over what to say, one final triumph for a man without none, one last declaration to strike fear into the hearts of men who liked to pretend themselves fearless. 

He wants to say _this is wrong_, because it is wrong, dying like this, head fit perfectly round through a noose, while the investigator who found him watches with dark eyes. Waiting to be vindicated. Waiting for absolution. But he has no more claim to those words than they do, in the end, and the ugly satisfaction seeps onto his tongue before anything else does. Those were her words anyway, her words before they hung her from a rope that snapped and the town had gasped and screamed of witches for three weeks after. 

So he says, “I saw her, I saw her.” (And he did see her, in graveyards with too many fresh flowers and morgues where the sound of crying wouldn’t stop, he saw her everywhere and nowhere.) The words tumble out, half giddy, suddenly all there, and when they kick the stool out from under him the world shifts a little and he can see her, see the light. 

There are tears in his eyes when he dies, and the townspeople murmur that he must’ve been a coward until the very end. 

4.  
See, the serial killer had been a good kid, growing up. They’d listened to parents and teachers and did everything they said to the letter. They’d been a good student too, could memorize multiplication tables and simple sums in a matter of minutes, read their textbooks and listened to their teachers and never forgot to print their name neatly at the top of each page. 

They’d been a good kid growing up--that must be what they would say, if they could see the serial killer now. _What went wrong_, the old librarian at the front desk might ask, peering over her stacks of books like there was an answer, some solution to be found and plugged in for the unknown variable. Simple. Basic algebra. Solve for x. 

_What went wrong._ Everything, they think now. The jailor is reading them their rights. Their rights, _ha_. Their fucking rights, the ones they recited over secondhand textbooks and single file rows: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness--

The godfather is staring at them now, silent, impassive. Does that matter? All the eyes in the square are on them. They want to scream _he made me do it_, kindergarten-sandbox king, the bully of a kid who pushed the others into the wood chips in order to get them to listen to him.

In elementary schools that would never be a good enough excuse--_Jimmy made me do it._

_If Jimmy told you to kill someone would you do that too?_ The teachers crossed their arms and turned up their noses and they sat in corners fiddling with broken crayons and purple bruises. 

If they screamed now everybody would listen. But the black and white copy-paste photos in their pocket are still there, still present. Letters from a mafia man who threatened to mail them to a poor mother who didn’t even know her child was still alive, much less a murderer. It’s those letters that keep them silent now, keep them staring at the apathetic eyes of a man who never gave a shit about anyone. If they screamed now, maybe, surely--but maybe this is justice, third grade schoolteacher justice--

_If he made you kill someone would you do that too_\--everything has a way of being so damn funny sometimes. 

5.  
i’m lonely and i didn’t mean to do it i swear i swear but oh god it felt so good and i’m so lonely and the blood it went everywhere and it got onto my face and i think i tasted some and oh god i killed someone what will mother think i’m so--

**Author's Note:**

> ????? this is kind of incomprehensible bullshit, but it's okay :))))). i realized while i was proofreading this that my grasp on first person has not gotten better at all but i'm running on sleep deprivation and the sense of productivity so uhh. anyway thanks for reading!


End file.
